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Reverse Engineering Protobuf Definitions from Compiled Binaries
How to extract raw source protobuf definitions from compiled binaries, regardless of the target architecture
Topics /
Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 1,116 posts.
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Baby’s Second Garbage Collector
This blog post is meant to an iteration on the tutorial and introduction to garbage collection implementation presented in this classic blog post . We are still working with simple garbage collectors, but this time another one with a bit more complexity.
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An unordered list of things I miss in Go
I like Go. I think it is a reasonable good language , and has some good qualities that makes up for its flaws. However, this doesn't mean I think the language couldn't be better, far from it.
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Things engineers believe about Web development
I wrote most of this post sometime in 2022 but I think it holds up alright in 2024 so I decided to publish it for posterity. I don’t really like doing posts like this—I’d much rather share some innocuous learnings or tips but it turns out I have opinions too 😓 Sorry! 2024-02-21: I’ve added a few reflections at the end…
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On Being a Senior Engineer (2012)
I think that there’s a lot of institutional knowledge in our field, especially about what makes for a productive engineer. But while there are a good deal of books in the management field about “expert” roles and responsibilities of non-technical individual contributors, I don’t see too many modern books or posts that…
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How (and why) to run SQLite in production
This is my personal site, where I write about Ruby, programming, and any of my varied fascinations.
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Postgres as a Search Engine
Build a retrieval system with semantic, full-text, and fuzzy search in Postgres to be used as a backbone in RAG pipelines.
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Lessons learned from profiling an algorithm in Rust
Recently, I've been working on a new approximate nearest neighbor search algorithm called RaBitQ . The author has already provided a C++ implementation that runs quite fast. I tried to rewrite it in Rust (yet another RiiR). But I found that my implementation is much slower than the original one. Here is how I improve…
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How to think about software quality (2022)
Not a weighty meandering 300 page Zen dialogue on Motorcycle Maintenance. Merely a meandering blog post in which one contemplates /Quality/ of software products.
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Floats Are Weird
Compute this limit more accurately with one weird trick!
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The Opposite of Documentation is Superstition (2020)
Yes I know I'm technically on vacation but if I go too long without writing I die from a witch's curse and I don't want to work on longform projects For...
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The plan-execute pattern
A ubiquitous pattern you won’t find in your textbook.
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Micrograd.jl
A series on automatic differentiation in Julia. Part 1 provides an overview and defines explicit chain rules.
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Zngur: A C++/Rust interop tool
Zngur (/zængɑr/) is a C++/Rust interop tool. It tries to expose arbitrary Rust types, methods, and functions while preserving their semantics and ergonomics as much as possible. Using Zngur, you can use arbitrary Rust crates in your C++ code as easily as using them in normal Rust code, and you can write idiomatic…
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Counting bytes faster than you'd think possible
“Summing ASCII Encoded Integers on Haswell at the Speed of memcpy” turned out more popular than I expected, which inspired me to take on another challenge on HighLoad: Counting uint8s . I’m currently only #13 on the leaderboard, ~7% behind #1, but I have already learned some interesting things. In this post I’ll…
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Better Dotfiles
I am Dan, full stack software engineer.
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Curl is inside 22,734 Steam games
About a year ago I blogged about games that use curl. In that post I listed a bunch of well-known titles I knew use curl and there was a list of 136 additional games giving credit to curl. Kind of amazing that over one hundred games decided to use curl! At the time, lots of … Continue reading Inside 22,734 Steam games…
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Optimizing the Particle Life: From 400 to 4M particles
Detailed description of an algorithm and a comparison between different languages.
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Tidy First?
“Software design is preparation for change; change of behavior” Tidy First? is a new book by Kent Beck. It is a short little book, only about 100 pages (and lots of white space on them)…
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Solving SAT via Positive Supercompilation
The boolean satisfiability problem (“SAT” for short) is arguably the most famous NP-complete problem in theoretical computer science. According to Wikipedia, it is “the problem of determining if there exists an interpretation that satisfies a given Boolean formula ”; or, in simpler terms, if there is at least one…
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Generating Mazes
Visualizations and techniques for different maze generation algorithms.
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How to read C type declarations (2003)
Even relatively new C programmers have no trouble reading simple C declarations such as
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Pratt Parsers: Expression Parsing Made Easy (2011)
Every now and then, I stumble onto some algorithm or idea that’s so clever and such a perfect solution to a problem that I feel like I got smarter or gained a new superpower just by learning it. Heaps were one, just about the only thing I got out of my truncated CS education. I recently stumbled onto another: Pratt or…
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Just because you can doesn't mean you should: the <meter> element
A very frustrating brownie recipe illustrates why a semantic element may actally NOT be the right tool for the job.
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Lush: My favorite small programming language
I meant to write about this when I started my blog in 2009. Eventually Lush kind of faded out of my consciousness, as it was a lot easier to get work doing stuff in R or Matlab or whatever. The guy…
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Extending Rust's Effect System
This is the transcript of my RustConf 2023 talk: "Extending Rust's Effect System", presented on September 13th 2023 in Albuquerque, New Mexico and streamed online.
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Unprojecting text with ellipses (2016)
Using transformed ellipses to estimate perspective transformations of text.
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Optimizers need a rethink
Thoughts on how compiler and database optimizers should evolve in the future, focusing on predictability and guarantees instead of smarts and heroics